History rhymes, Lily, and Movie meme 9

Where do I start with this? I want to tell a story about visiting with the family for Thanksgiving, and also to introduce a name for a character I've mentioned before. She's dead, but "only in the technical sense." And as I give her a name, I also want to give her a cinematic face. So many things to do.

My cousin and her mother-in-law

Let's start with today and work backwards. A month ago, Mother and Brother and SIL and I all drove to where my aunts and uncles (and all their children) have settled. It's in another state, but reachable in a day's driving. I mention this year's trip here, and I've talked about making the same trip before, around other Thanksgivings (for example here or here or here).

Anyway, while I was there I stayed with one aunt and my uncle. Some of that time was spent cooking for The Big Day. Some of it was spent in silence, or just reading placidly. And occasionally we visited with other members of the family.

Once day, her oldest daughter came over. (This is my cousin C.) The nominal reason for her visit was to discuss some aspect of the food preparation for Thanksgiving. But then she started talking to my aunt about how things were going at home. C's husband is from Latin America, and last year his mother emigrated from the Old Country to the USA to live with them. C's mother-in-law is wheelchair-bound and doesn't speak much English. Also, she complains chronically. Whenever she makes any comment on anything, it's a negative comment. C is having a lot of trouble dealing with this ongoing criticism. My aunt talked to her for a while. I was sitting in the same room reading, so I heard what was going on. But nobody invited me into the conversation, so I stayed out of it.

But I remembered what she said. And a few days later, when the whole family was out to dinner one evening, I motioned C over so I could talk to her for a few minutes. What I told her was something like this:

Marie and me

Just now I was scrolling through my Downloads folder looking for a picture I know I saved a while ago, and I ran across this. It seems that I saved it back in the middle of November. I have no recollection where I saw it, what the context might have been, or any of that.

It describes my life all too well. Also Marie's. I always knew we had something in common.

  

"Just another mental disorder"

I just stumbled across a delightful video clip on Twitter. Curtis Yarvin explains that "at a certain level, intelligence is just another mental disorder."

Does anyone know how to embed Twitter videos in these blogposts? Here's the best I can do:

Curtis Yarvin Twitter video  

Being late

Yesterday I wrote that I thought SIL was mad at me because I made a slighting remark about her and Brother potentially being late for something. (In reality we arrived only a few minutes before they did.) Why would this make her mad?

Most basically, it would make her mad because the two of them must hear it a lot. (Or do they? Is it only from me?) And that, in turn, is because they are always late. For everything.

It's possible that they may have gotten a little better in the last couple of years, but Brother is almost 59. (SIL is only in her forties.) A couple of years doesn't make much difference when it stands up against decades of predictable lateness.

And honestly, the whole family jokes about them behind their backs. I may be the only one who says anything to their faces—or at any rate, the only one since Wife left the family—but my remarks are joking and friendly compared to the acid commentary from my aunts. Even Mother, who is careful never to say anything overtly critical (because Brother is, after all, her son) nonetheless builds plans around an assumption that Brother and SIL will be late.

So if this is an established pattern, where did it come from? I tried to think about it this evening, and that turns out to be a harder question than it looks like.

When Brother and I were little kids, the "Late Ones" in the extended family were the four of us: Mother and Father, with Brother and me in tow. Since the "extended family" in question was always Mother's family … 

(Father was an only child, his father never saw his relatives, and my grandmother's sisters rarely visited), 

… the blame was implicitly dumped on Father. The principle seems to have been, "Always blame the one who married into the family for any dysfunction, rather than one of Us."

For years I believed this, just because everyone else seemed to believe it. But in retrospect, I remember many times that we were getting ready to go somewhere and Father was standing at the front door with his car keys in hand—and suddenly Mother decided she had to wash her hair. She kept her hair very long in those days, so washing it (and drying it) was a really big deal. Father would yell impatiently (and impotently), "But we're going to be late!" And she would go ahead anyway. Sometime in the last year or so, she even admitted to me that back in the past she was bad at sticking to a schedule or getting to events on time.

Making everybody mad at me, 2

OK, partly I borrowed the title from an unfinished post back in 2008. But also I'm starting to think that my social skills are failing me. (See also this post and this one, both from earlier in the year.)

Recently I visited Son 2 and Beryl, on the occasion of Son 2 getting his Master's degree. I allude to it briefly here, where I also mention that this was the first time since Son 2 graduated from high school eight years ago that all four of us—Son 2, Son 2, Wife, and I—were in the same place at the same time. So Son 2 insisted strictly on goof behavior from all of us. There was to be NO UNPLEASANTNESS, no matter what. It was a good rule, and I agreed with it.

Several times, Son 2 issued a warning on this point: all of them were when Son 1 made some kind of sarcastic remark about Wife (who lives with him). But only once did I see Son 1 and Son 2 mobilize in unison to shut someone down. And it was me. We were at a restaurant, and the waitress repeatedly misunderstood my order, besides assigning my order to Wife (who had ordered something totally different). I tried to clarify for what felt like the third time (though perhaps it was the fourth), and both boys stopped me short. It was time for me to keep silent and say nothing. And they both had a look and tone of utter seriousness. 

Well, I shut up and the order got straightened out. Dinner went on. But it made me think: Of all of the possible detonations in the minefield of our immediate family, the one that they are most worried about is Me Going Off about something. And it shook me. These days I don't think of myself as all that threatening. But maybe they remembered a time in the past, when I used to get much angrier. "As angry as Daddy," as the saying went.

That's one story.

This weekend I visited Mother. The two of us, together with Brother and SIL, went out to the Philharmonic. We met up there. Brother and SIL have a long-standing habit of showing up late to things, and Mother wanted to hear the talk that was given an hour before the show. At seven minutes before the talk, she told me we'd wait until five minutes before the talk, and then go in without them. Two minute later—at exactly five minutes before the talk—Brother and SIL showed up. I said, "Great timing!" in a congratulatory tone, and passed along Mother's plan as we all went in together. SIL did not speak to me the entire evening, and pointedly sat as far away from me as the seating arrangements would allow. We all went out to dinner together afterwards, and she still didn't speak to me. (And she sat diagonally across the table from me—again, at the farthest possible distance.) It was subtle, but also obvious for anyone who was watching for it. (I guess that means me.)

That's another story.

I guess I told a third story when I talked about my visit with Schmidt.

Maybe I'm being oversensitive, straining to find rejection and criticism where there is none, because it feeds my fantasies of being rejected. (See, e.g., here or here or here.)

Or maybe living alone so much has made me forget how to be around other people.  

     

Mother is aging, 2

Over the weekend, I visited Mother. While there, I told her about my visit to Schmidt, and explained that Ma Schmidt has effectively no remaining short-term memory. Mother said she worries about that too. But she still works (part-time) at an intellectually demanding job. Also she's five years younger than Ma Schmidt. And five years ago (at the time of this visit, though I don't discuss the topic in that post), Ma Schmidt was already showing more signs of memory loss than Mother shows today. So I told Mother than I guess her work is keeping her mind active. She said if she starts getting forgetful about her work, she'll have to retire.

Then this morning I was making us some eggs for breakfast, She got out a loaf of panettone from Trader Joe's, cut a few slices, and put them under the broiler to toast. Then she wandered off to fiddle with the coffee maker and make us some coffee.

Within sixty seconds—maybe more like thirty—the panettone was burning and smoke was flowing through the kitchen. I jerked it out of the oven and turned off the broiler. Mother continued to fiddle with the coffee-maker, and suggested, "You can flip them over and toast the other side too." "No, I'm dealing with the eggs!" Five minutes later the eggs were done and the coffee was finally dripping. Only then did she wander back to the oven to toast the other sides, and I told her no, we were ready to eat.

Was it forgetfulness? Maybe, but maybe not. It all happened too fast for me to be comfortable blaming forgetfulness. It was certainly bad judgement. 

Was it a new phenomenon? I don't know. Cooking really isn't her thing. If I had put food less than two inches from a 550° broiler and then ambled away, it would be a clear sign that I was either drunk or senile. But I cook more than she does. So it's hard for me to diagnose.

I feel like I'm seeing the first cracks in her hitherto admirable intellect. Or not quite the first cracks—see also this post from just about two years ago—but some very early ones. I don't want to admit it or think about it, because she's my mother and I love her. Also, if her fine mind starts to become unreliable, it will mean someone has to move in with her (and I'm the one without a job) or else she has to move into managed care. Either way means a huge change in the way all of us lives, including me. So I want to postpone that day as long as possible.

But like it or not, Mother is aging.

      

What's my favorite movie?

Back in August, in this post here, I raised the question What is my favorite movie? It was genuinely a question. At the time I posed it, I had some ideas, but I wasn't sure I had a winner. At some level I'm still not certain, but I think the preponderance of weight is in one direction.

At the same time, it may be more informative to think about all the contenders. If nothing else, that may give a more rounded picture of my obsessions. (I think that's a joke.) No single movie can say everything, after all.

I emailed the question to Son 1 and Son 2, asking them:

If people were having this discussion about me after I was gone, what would they SAY was my favorite movie?...

Does either of you have an idea how you'd answer the question, based on knowing me for a bunch of years? There's no wrong answer, because it's all about what impressions you've gotten from me over the years. (And those could be anything.) But I'm curious.

If you've got a quick, shoot-from-the-hip answer, go with that. Don't overthink it.

Son 1 ignored the email. Son 2 sent back two possible contenders, which I will identify when I get to them, below.

A word about how I came up with this list: I've seen a lot of movies, over the years, so I started by making a list of movies that I have referenced in this blog. That gave me a good starting point, but I realize just now as I am writing this that it leaves out some spectacularly good work. Because it just so happens that I never wrote about them, I left off of my list classics like "The Godfather" and "The Producers", both brilliant films. So if I had composed my long-list differently, is it possible that one or both of these might have made it to my short list?

It's possible, but not—I think—in an interesting way. What's interesting about my father's love for "The Red Shoes" is how it sheds light on the major themes in his life. And while I love to watch the dramas of Michael Corleone, or Max Bialystock—or hell, even Rick Blaine or Charles Foster Kane—their lives are definitely something Other, something that is happening Out There. There's no real resonance In Here, except for the resonance that every moviegoer feels (which is why they are all such popular movies). So in that sense, doing an initial filter by considering movies that I've written about here isn't a bad way to proceed.

With all that in mind, here are the six movies that particularly jumped out at me, as I pondered the list of movies I have discussed in this blog.